#62. Roasted Beef Marrow Bones at Brasserie Pascal

We continue to countdown our 100 favorite dishes at local restaurants. We'll be sharing these with you every weekday until our annual Best Of Issue comes out. Enjoy!

#62. Roasted Beef Marrow Bones at Brasserie Pascal

You could trace back the popularity of roasted beef marrow bones to one man, Fergus Henderson. His restaurant, St. John, was a restaurant that did two seemingly impossible things: it made off-cuts of meat chic and British food relevant. Henderson's cookbook, Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking, became a sort of tome on how to prepare the often neglected cuts of an animal; and one of the most popular dishes at the restaurant and in the cook book was his roasted beef marrow bones.

Here in Orange County, the best place to get roasted beef marrow bones is not an English place, but a honest-to-goodness French restaurant by none other than Pascal Olhats. At his Brasserie Pascal, Olhats splits the bones lengthwise, an improvement, actually, from the cross-sections that Henderson chooses to prepare his. Done the Olhats way, you can run the tiny tines of you fork straight down the tube to get at every last speck of the marrow's Jell-O-like jiggle, which is salty, fatty, and unlike any animal product you've ever had before. You spread it on toast and it melts like chunky brown butter.

The thrill of eating of your first one will feel like it's a forbidden kind of food, as if you're eating something you're not supposed to enjoy. You can't help but feel lightheaded and then sorrow when you think about how many precious beef marrow bones you've previously let gone to waste without so much as any thought about the goodness that was hidden inside.

Edwin Goei was born on the island of Java, grew up in La Habra, studied in Irvine, and eats everywhere. Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, he went by the alias "elmomonster" on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.